MBA in India

IIM-Calcutta to introduce reservation for women

Published On: 22 Aug 2012

| Last Updated On: 22 Aug 2012

IIM-C (Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta) has decided to implement “reservation” for female candidates to increase the gender diversity on campus, which is mostly male dominated. This will be made effective from the coming academic year. Once implemented, IIM-C will be one of the first older IIMs to modify its admission formula.

Presently, the institute has only 10% women out of the total students on campus. Thus, women have to fit themselves into a male dominated culture. Moreover, increase in the number of women candidates will improve the discipline and environment of the campus.

The smaller and newer IIMs such as IIM Kozhikode and Lucknow have already implemented new formula for easy admissions of women. However, bigger and older IIMs preferred to remain restrained on this issue all these years. But IIM-C has finally decided to take initiative to bridge the unequal gender ratio on campus. This would require a crucial modification in the current selection formula. The first level of admission remains same through CAT (Common Admission Test) – applicable on all IIMs; change will be introduced in the next level, i.e shortlisting stage. Currently, selection is based on CAT score and Class X and XII scores of a student. From now onwards, extra marks will be added to the scores of women candidates.

The IIM-C admission committee will decide the marks to be allotted to women candidates. The new selection criteria will then be presented to the academic and faculty council for approval. The change in admission criteria to be introduced at IIM-C will be different from that brought in by other IIMs. While other IIMs have introduced advantage to the women at the third stage of admissions – interview, IIM-C will be granting them benefit at the shortlisting stage itself – second stage. This will enable institute to generate a larger pool of women for interview process.

The aim of IIM-C is to increase the number of female candidates that meet the faculty in the interview stage so that their chances of getting selected is high.